Fantasy sports games have grown in popularity exponentially over the past twenty years. Users from around the world compete in fantasy sports leagues, tournaments, and matchups against family, friends, and even complete strangers. Fantasy sports games can be found for every sport out there, from football, basketball, baseball, and hockey to more obscure sports such as tennis, golf, and even eSports.
Fantasy sports gamers can choose from season long leagues, where each user assembles a roster of players and sets a lineup week-to-week, dynasty leagues, where each user assembles a roster and can hold onto players from one season to the next, and daily leagues, where each user assembles a new roster every week. Many different platforms for fantasy sports exist, with sources including ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, DraftKings, and Fan Duel. The variety of platforms and fantasy sports leagues continues to grow as fantasy sports continue to rise in popularity.
Historically, fantasy sports gaming involved selecting players from a list provided by the host website. A user entered his or her league page, viewed his or her fantasy teams, and chose available players to add to his or her team using well-known methods for electronic devices, such as point-and-click using a mouse or touchscreen. While this method is effective, it lacks a certain level of excitement in acquiring a player that the user really wants for his or her team.
In addition, younger users are becoming more and more involved in fantasy sports gaming. There is an interest in getting young people out and active in order to fight certain medical issues that can start early in life and often arise due to inactivity, such as heart disease, diabetes, etc. So, there is a motivation to create a fantasy sports game that encourages users to get out and be active.
To that end, certain fantasy sports games provide incentives to users to exercise and be more active. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2014/0163705 seeks to motivate users to exercise by providing incentives and bonuses to their fantasy team performance. A user might earn bonus points by logging the most exercise time in the league or by logging more exercise time than his or her opponent that week. Or other incentives may be exercise performance based, such as draft order or waiver order. While these techniques are helpful, there remains a need for a fantasy sports game that encourages all users to be more active.
Fantasy sports gaming has historically been a sedentary activity, with little motivation for the users to be active and exercise. There is a need in the art for a fantasy sports game that inspires users to get outside and become actively engaged in the game. The advent of augmented reality in gaming provides a new manner of providing such motivation.
Augmented reality in gaming is a popular new trend. Games involving an augmented reality component, such as Pokemon Go, are growing in popularity. The augmented reality places digital images upon a real-world map of the user's surrounding environment using an imaging device and/or application from the user's mobile device. The augmented image changes as the user changes location and, thereby, changes the real-world map. The change in the augmented reality component of the game inspires users to actively move about during the gaming experience.
Fantasy sports gaming can therefore benefit from implementing an augmented reality component. Combining augmented reality with fantasy sports games can help to solve the need in the art for a manner of inspiring users, especially younger users, to exercise and be active during fantasy sports gaming.